Design Is the Silent Ambassador of Your Brand
An impactful design can help you outperform your competitors. According to the Design Management Institute, companies that opted for a compelling design were seen defeating other companies with weak designs on the S&P index by 219%.
On the other hand, Tyton Media’s survey also concluded that 48% of individuals determine a business’s credibility through its website design. These stats align with the idea of famous graphic designer, Paul Rand who considered design as the silent ambassador of your brand.
Moreover, design creates a consistent visual language and instant connection to your products or services, boosting your brand’s credibility and recognition. As a company owner, you need to create a lasting impression. That’s where the design comes in and enables you to engage and excite your customers or target audience.
A good design consists of typefaces, color scheme, load time, and mobile-friendly features. These factors can increase your chances of receiving more traffic to your website.
Why Design Is Important?
A person’s eyes require only 2.6 seconds to focus on a particular element of a webpage, concluded researchers from the Missouri University of Science and Technology. A user-friendly design is likely to influence their opinion.
People have [feelings] about your company based on the experiences that they have had with a brand. A well-designed logo and website inspires confidence because it looks professional. If a company is willing to focus on creating a clean and functional design that is easy to use, then that could be an indicator of what using their product might be like.
Adriana Marin, Freelance Art Director
A good design conveys your message in the most effective manner:
Good design helps to communicate your message, pulls weight to cut through the marketing chatter, and arranges information most effectively for the precise market you’re trying to reach. Effective design and messaging work in tandem to convey the value of your business legibly and, most importantly, memorably.
Lilian Crooks, Graphic Designer and Communications Specialist at Harcum College
Know that good design isn’t limited to the website or logo. You need to focus on the packaging or product designing as well. When your products communicate your message, define your values and appeal to your target audience, you’re likely to develop an awesome brand.
Good Design Helps You Stand Out
The design can make or break your business. If it’s compelling and functional, you’re likely to stand out among the competitors. It’s no secret that people gravitate towards products with modern and impressive designs.
For example, you will ultimately attract to a specific product that features phenomenal design and modern packaging. People often have biased opinions towards beauty.
Human beings have an attractiveness bias; we perceive beautiful things as being better, regardless of whether they are better. All else being equal, we prefer beautiful things, and we believe beautiful things function better. As in nature, function can follow form.
Steven Bradley, Author of Design Fundamentals
Moreover, a study also suggested that you can assess visual appeal within 50 milliseconds. As a designer, you need to make an impression, capture the attention within those 50 milliseconds communicating who you are and what you do.
You will understand the concept by looking at the cosmetic brands; Anatomicals and Cetaphil.
Cetaphil uses a simple, color scheme and no fun product names, setting a serious tone. The product line was designed to showcase that the brand is all about the product and its functionality. Whereas, Anatomicals opts for humorous product names and large font types.
They use vibrant colors and set a light-hearted tone. You also need to focus on the key factors that you want to convey to your customers and ensure that they reflect in your product design.
Design Promotes Brand Consistency
Could you imagine Google displaying search results using a cursive font or a pink McDonald’s logo? We understand it’s hard to think about those changes.
Google’s layout and McDonald’s logo are more than design elements; they are a crucial part of their brand and a great example of brand consistency.
Consistency is essential when you want to build a cohesive brand. It is arguably the key rule that ensures your brand’s success.
Both aforementioned brands focused on creating a consistent brand incorporating memorable elements.
- Promotes brand recognition that leads to maximum engagement.
- Increases brand value that might boost sales.
- Helps you stand out in the industry.
On the other hand, an inconsistent brand appears chaotic, disorganized and confusing. It can also undermine the credibility of your business and limit your chances of success.
Moreover, you need to consider your brand as your company’s public identity. Therefore, it should showcase the best attributes of your company or business to engage the audience.
Also, risking your logo being used wrongly or its colors being adapted loosely also lead to inconsistency. People tend to forget an inconsistent brand. Because they can’t think of a particular colors or symbol when they talk about it.
For example, when talking about Coca-Cola, you can picture that its logo has red color to it. And when you come across the Nike logo, you can recognize it as a footwear or apparel manufacturing brand.
Hence, if your target audience can’t associate particular colors with your brand or don’t recognize its logo, you might need to work on the design, and make it consistent so that your target audience can recognize it with ease.
Garner Customer Trust with User-friendly Website Design
There’s no denying that some people interact with a business for the first time through its website. Therefore, the impression your website leaves is incredibly important to consider. A good website design can help leave a lasting impact on your website visitors.
Websites with bad designs aren’t trusted or visited for any length of time.
Poor interface design was particularly associated with rapid rejection and mistrust of a website,” adding, “In cases where the participants did not like some aspect of the design the site was often not explored further than the homepage and was not considered suitable for revisiting at a later date…”
CrazyEgg, Does Good Web Design Really Matter?
This roofing contractor in Central Indiana didn’t receive a single qualified lead from their old site in the last year. The new site, designed and developed by DK New Media produced over a dozen qualified leads every month since launching – with the same traffic. Personalization, trust indicators, real photography, and a manned chat speaks directly to the visitors with no doubt of the services offered.
Douglas Karr, DK New Media
Influence Customers with Appealing Packaging Design
Packaging design of your products or goods is quite similar to website design. Your consumers pay for product or service and influenced by the packaging in both scenarios.
Moreover, Blink – a book by Malcolm Gladwell discusses the point in detail that additions or slight tweaks to the packaging design can shape customer’s perception about the product.
Also, they consider a product as the combination of the packaging and product.
If you add 15 percent more yellow to the green on 7 UP packaging, people report that it has more lime or lemon flavor, even though the drink itself was left untouched. On a can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli, a picture of a close up of a real human face influences perceived quality more than a full body shot or a cartoon character… and in the Hormel logo, adding a sprig of parsley between the ‘r’ and ‘m’ causes customers to perceive the products as being more fresh.
Joseph Putnam, CrazyEgg
These examples demonstrate that the packaging influences customer’s impressions, quality and even the taste of a product. If you observe closely, the 7 UP example tells that customers have different associations to a specific hue and subconscious reactions to it.
Therefore, making calculated design decisions help with how your customer-base see, perceive and consume your product.
How Brand’s Change Their Logo to Increase User Engagement
Many famous comic book characters are a brand in their own right, especially those who have had entire cinematic franchises built around. One of the most iconic superhero logos is that sported by Batman. The well-known symbol of a bat in flight has been redesigned a few times since its inception, with the new logo released in 2000 showcasing the true, dark nature of the character it portrays.
Increase Brand Identity with a Logo Design
A logo is always an important element of any brand. Its design needs to be compelling yet professional. Many businesses fail to recognize the value of well-thought and appealing logo design. They often go for pre-made logos or opt for a do-it-yourself approach.
Moreover, designing a logo isn’t about choosing bright hues and unique typography. But it needs to reflect your brand, communicate your business message, has the right font and color palette. It’s true that a great logo showcases the true picture of your business and values.
A simple, consistent, and memorable logo can be beneficial. If you’re launching a brand or planning to incorporate a new dimension to your existing logo, you can focus on the trends, your brand identity and value to ensure that your logo develops the interest of your target audience around your brand.
Take FedEx’s logo for example. The use of orange and purple colors incorporate positivity and vibrancy. If you observe closely, the arrow shown between the letters E & X tells to move forward.
You can also try focusing on such crucial elements and incorporate them in your logo intelligently to make a subconscious presence, especially if your brand belongs to a courier or logistics industry. But don’t forget to learn how to copyright a logo to protect it from getting pirated.
Decode Brand Message with Colors
Have you ever thought why experts emphasize on choosing the right color-scheme? These colors help translate your message and promote brand recognition.
If you choose cautiously, the color palette of your logo helps in evoking the right type of emotions. For example, Louis Vuitton uses black color in their logo that makes it a premium and luxury brand.
Choose the Right Fonts
Fonts are the identifiers of your logo and have a definite purpose. You can be creative in your selection of fonts. But it’s best to use one font in a logo.
When choosing the fonts for your logo, know that the bold ones are considered masculine fonts and cursive fonts are known as feminine fonts.
You can also think about using rounded typefaces as they depict care, softness and tenderness.
Focus on Shape Effect
Did you know your logo’s shape has potential to improve your brand meaning?
For example, circular designs reflect positivity, community, endurance or even femininity whereas square designs or the ones with hard and sharp edges send the message of strength, professionalism, balance and efficiency.
On the other hand, triangles design can help convey powerful, legal or scientific ideas.
Design Can Help Broaden your Target Audience
Do you want to target a different market? Try tweaking your existing packaging. If you own a brand that specifically produced skin care products for women, you can still target the male market.
There’s no need to make major alternations to your designs. And to appeal to the masculine demographic, you can opt for simple design changes.
For example, Nivea offers a range of personal care products, including creams, lotions or deodorants to women. Also, the brand managed to diversify their market by targeting male demographic using a sharper and masculine design.
According to The Design Council study, design alert businesses likely to develop newer products or services twice as compared to the businesses that don’t focus on the design factor. Therefore, think about where you could take your brand by making a few stylistic adjustments.
Investing in Design
No doubt, design can have significant effect on your business or brand. It’s evident that a good design brings various advantages, including competitive edge, exciting market results and making you stand out from the crowd.
As an ambassador of your brand, design helps in building customer trust, targeting a new market, promoting brand consistency, making an impactful impression, and initiating successful campaigns, and more. Therefore, it’s best to focus on the design and elements that make it successful. Because investing in cutting-edge design means investing in your long-term success.
Disclosure: This article was edited to include affiliate links as well as a customer example from Douglas Karr’s firm, DK New Media.
